drum language

That portion of western Africa known as the Bend is the area of talking drums, by means of which messages are conveyed for up to 20 miles (32 km), to be relayed by another drummer. Languages of this area are characterized by pronounced high and low pitch tones (tone languages), a quality exploited when two drums—a lower-pitched, or male, drum and a higher-pitched, or female,...

Gullah

...their own linguistic diversity. Then as now, Africa was marked by a multitude of languages. This made it almost impossible for slaves, who typically originated in different places, to find a single African language to use in common. They appropriated English as a common language, and it was in turn modified and influenced by the
African languages they originally spoke.

music

...depends on the tone or pitch in which they are said. Consequently, instrumental music—or even natural sounds such as birdsong—often imitates or suggests meaningful phrases of the spoken language. Sometimes this is intentional and sometimes it is merely fortuitous, but in either case it escapes the notice of uninformed outsiders.

Westermann

German scholar of
African languages and culture who refined and extended the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher. Westermann specialized in the languages of an enormously complex linguistic region extending from the Sénégal River eastward to the upper reaches of the Nile River.